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In response to Donald Trump’s election victory, some women in the US are joining a radical feminist movement that seeks to “decentralize” men in their lives. The movement, called 4B, originated in South Korea about a decade ago in response to broader dissatisfaction with gender discrimination and sexual violence online. Now thousands of Americans are tuning in to the movement on social media as Trump—who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn national abortion rights, and has been found liable for sexual abuse—prepares to return to office. While the movement has yet to show signs of gaining traction offline, its resurgence reflects a growing sense of frustration among women who fear that Trump’s second term will be characterized by unchecked misogyny and the continued rollback of bodily autonomy in the US.
The name 4B refers to the “four nos,” which encourage women not to date, marry, have sex, or bear children. (The Korean word for “no” is “bi.”) The movement originated in feminist circles on X, then known as Twitter, in 2016, after a twenty-three-year-old woman was murdered in a public restroom in Seoul. The assailant, a man in his mid-thirties, said that he felt “ignored and belittled” by women, but in spite of this, the police refused to label the murder a hate crime, according to The Cut. This kickstarted discussions across online forums.
Around the same time, a different feminist wave was gaining traction in South Korea: the so-called “escape the corset” campaign, which sought to free women from prejudicial beauty standards. As the movement grew into a fashion statement, many young South Korean women participated by swearing off makeup and cutting their hair short. Building on the momentum from this campaign, the 4B movement sought to create space for women and more broadly reject traditional gender norms. South Korea has one of the widest gender gaps in the developed world; as of 2022, women earned 31 percent less than men (based on median hourly wages). Thousands of people, particularly women, have also been the victims of a surge in nonconsensual pornography and “molka crimes,” a term referring to tiny spy cameras installed in public bathrooms, motel rooms, or similar spaces to capture voyeuristic images. Ninety-eight percent of those arrested for making illegal sexual recordings have been men, according to Coda Story.
Now the 4B movement appears to be booming on social media in the US: at time of writing, there were over a hundred thousand videos about the movement on TikTok; Google registered a massive surge in the search for “4B” starting on Election Day. “I’ve been waiting for everyone to catch up to speed for a while,” Alexa Vargas, a 4B adherent, said in a TikTok video posted last week. In a less restrictive interpretation of the movement’s tenets, Vargas encouraged women not to engage in “hookup culture” and to wait at least three months before considering having sex with new romantic partners. “Decenter men from your life,” she advised. “Get off the dating apps.” Another TikTok user said that she’d been keeping her participation in the movement private but decided to speak about her experiences publicly after the election: “As somebody who’s been 4B for two years now…at thirty-six years old, it is the best thing I’ve ever done for my mental health,” she said. “We are not alone in this.”
It’s too early to tell whether the movement will have much staying power, but it has already sparked a debate, both online and in more traditional media. Sex strikes are about as old as male-dominated societies: the practice has been an anti-war measure for centuries—it was central to the plot of the Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women on both sides of the Peloponnesian War denied their husbands sex as a way of forcing peace talks—and more recently has returned to the discourse in the US following the introduction of a strict anti-abortion measure in Georgia and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. (Lysistrata was also adapted, in late 2015, into Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.) Such movements “rarely result in widespread support,” Helen Morales, a cultural critic and classicist, told The Guardian in 2022, but they can be a powerful tool for building awareness. “Women tend to protest with their bodies when they don’t have a voice,” Morales added.
And yet sex strikes have often been ridiculed in the West and its media, and as soon as 4B hashtags began to garner engagement last week, criticism of the idea bubbled up again. Kami Rieck, an opinion editor at the New York Times, argued that sex strikes are a losing strategy for American women. (“The 4B philosophy is shortsighted, primarily because it demonizes men, including those who champion equality and reproductive freedom, while constraining the women who participate in it,” Rieck wrote.) And the movement has faced outright misogyny, in particular from men on the far right. According to a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, women have experienced an onslaught of online abuse and harassment following Trump’s victory, including a significant rise in posts focused on repealing the Nineteenth Amendment (which gave women the right to vote) and increased mentions of the phrase “your body, my choice.” Nick Fuentes, a white-supremacist influencer, tweeted it to his over four hundred thousand followers on the day of the election.
4B has also faced stark backlash from another popular women’s movement online, led by social media influencers who advocate for the return of “traditional” domestic gender roles and the importance of women’s perceived work as homemakers and mothers. Many self-described “trad wives” (a popular term in this community) mocked the 4B cause on TikTok and elsewhere. “With the 4B movement taking off, I just want you to know I’ll be doing my part to keep the birth rate from declining,” one TikTok user who frequently posts pro-“trad” videos wrote. The stark contrast between these ideologically opposed online trends reveals a growing divide between American women, and young women in particular.
Even amid all this, there’s a risk that journalistic attention to the broader issues of women’s rights and bodily autonomy will decline post-election. During and since Trump’s first term, online feminist activism has been a major story across the media landscape, especially since the repeal of Roe—but, as votes have been tallied, it’s become increasingly clear that women didn’t overwhelmingly support Trump’s pro-choice opponent, Kamala Harris. (Overall, a majority of women voted for Harris, but in smaller numbers than for Joe Biden.)
Still, the rapid rise of the 4B movement in the US signals a growing anxiety on the part of women who fear that their rights will come under even greater threat during the second Trump presidency. Knowing this, the need for journalism that accurately and faithfully captures these concerns may be more important now than ever. While viral slogans and seemingly radical activist tactics may come and go with the breakneck speed of online news cycles, they hint at underlying shifts in public opinion that warrant the press’s continual attention, as well as its scrutiny.
Other notable stories:
- Out this morning, New York’s Charlotte Klein assesses how major outlets are preparing to cover Trump’s second term, from the ongoing talks over reportorial assignments to uncertainty as to how Trump will run the White House briefing room. On the latter front, Sara Fischer and Sophia Cai report, for Axios, that he could shake things up, including by giving MAGA-friendly outlets credentials; the pair also report that a “fierce competition” is underway for the role of press secretary, with Karoline Leavitt, Alina Habba, and Monica Crowley among the names in the frame. Meanwhile, NOTUS reports on the scene that unfolded when reporters informed senators that Trump had picked Matt Gaetz, the scandal-plagued congressman, for attorney general. Per Punchbowl, Sen. Chuck Grassley “stood speechless for 30 seconds” as he was grilled on the news.
- On Tuesday, a federal judge sentenced Jack Teixeira—the young Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who shared sensitive government documents on the social platform Discord, and was subsequently arrested and charged under the Espionage Act—to fifteen years in prison. (We wrote about the Teixeira leak, and what it meant for journalism, last year.) Then, yesterday, we learned that Asif W. Rahman, a CIA official, has been charged, also under the Espionage Act, for sharing classified documents containing possible details of Israeli plans to strike Iran. The documents circulated on the Telegram messaging app last month; initially, as the New York Times reports, officials said that they didn’t know where the leak came from and were looking for the source.
- In yesterday’s newsletter, we noted that a number of French newspapers, including Le Monde, were suing X, alleging that the platform has violated French and European laws that require big tech platforms to compensate publishers when the latter’s content is shared on their sites. Now Le Monde reports that a court in France has intervened in a separate dispute revolving around the same laws, this time involving Google and various European publishers; Google had proposed to temporarily block content from these outlets from appearing for certain users, calling this a limited experiment to establish the effects of such a measure, but the court ordered Google not to go ahead with the test.
- Over the summer, Selina Cheng, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Hong Kong, claimed that the paper had fired her after she put herself forward to lead a local journalists’ association that has come under fire from officials in the territory, where press freedom is in decline; the Journal, Cheng alleged, told her that the role would be incompatible with her journalistic work. (Cheng wrote for CJR about her firing.) This week, Cheng said she is taking legal action against the Journal, and plans to allege before a tribunal that the paper fired her illegally due to her work with a union. The Associated Press has more.
- And certain Gaza-based correspondents for Al Jazeera said that they would stop broadcasting this week, in protest of what they described as the delayed payment of wages and expenses; one correspondent told colleagues that stalled fuel payments have meant that journalists can no longer get around in their own vehicles, and that they don’t want to use public transport for safety reasons. Al Jazeera blamed the delays on logistical problems with getting money into Gaza; Semafor’s Max Tani has more.
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